duel in the dark

I picked up a copy of this over the weekend as well. Looks like an interesting attempt to Euroize a wargame. I like the flight plan mechanism but that seems a little too rigid for me. I'll have to see how it plays out. The bits are pretty nice though although the information display on the back seems to have too much of a pro-German slant for me (someone might want to remind them just who started the war in the first place....Oh wait, is that not PC anymore because of the terror bombing campaign?)...

I love this game! I played it over the Christmas break and really enjoyed it! many critics don't like it because the units are not eliminated but the units represent more than one plane anyway.

This was nominated for a Platinum Pawn award. Good game!

the*mad*gamer wrote:

I love this game! I played it over the Christmas break and really enjoyed it! many critics don't like it because the units are not eliminated but the units represent more than one plane anyway.

This was nominated for a Platinum Pawn award. Good game!

It looks like a good game. I don't have a problem with units not being elminated. I think the victory points lost reflect the losing of strength from fighter attacks and what not. Like I said, I think the flight path mechanism is interesting but it does put some rigidity in the game (but maybe that's what happened since that mechanism is also in Downtown Air War).

Beautiful looking game that utterly bored the shit out of me.

This is a solid game, but it could have used more death!

It took me a couple of plays to get into it, and has sat on the shelf since then as I started to find out about proper war games.

The big complaint I have about it is that it smells like it was sitting in a musty warehouse somewhere. Af+ter reading a thread on that other site, it sounds like this is not an isolated issue and it sounds like there's not alot I can do about it other than fixing it myself.

I think the flight path mechanic is representative of how bombing raids worked. A point of entry, target, and exit path were planned and navigated with limited intel on defenses. The game allows for some shifting in the programmed path which I think is supposed to represent the flexibility of the pilots adjusting for whatever they encountered.

bob_the_goon wrote:

I think the flight path mechanic is representative of how bombing raids worked. A point of entry, target, and exit path were planned and navigated with limited intel on defenses. The game allows for some shifting in the programmed path which I think is supposed to represent the flexibility of the pilots adjusting for whatever they encountered.

Yeah, and even a more complex game such as Dowtown: The Air War Over Hanoi forces the principle bombing units to follow a preplotted path. It allows for some deviation, especially when getting near the target, but other than that you have to follow the plan.

I think it's a cool mechanic.

I'd actually like to try Duel in the Dark, but I don't if it's too simple to hold my interests or not.

I have Downtown, but no one to play with, ha!

I'm interested in learning more about Duel Above the Clouds though.

I should just pick up B-17 and maybe B-29 once that is released if i want to do some strategic bombing. At least those will get played.

The lack of unit elimination isn't a big deal to me in this one because all of a half-dozen figures represent in the neighborhood of hundreds of actual aircraft. At that level of abstraction, an eliminated unit would have meant catastrophic failure on the order of maybe 150-200+ planes lost. I'm not sure a single bombing run ever saw that many losses for any force. I think the victory point mechanism represents the real losses reasonably well.

My biggest complaint [other than the obvious mold issue] is that I can't fathom how this got through playtesting without someone saying "Zev, you're overproducing this game a thousand different ways; howsabout spending the extra nickel to throw in a planning pad a la the old Diplomacy maps."